README.mkd

MuseumVille

Museumville is a game based on the digital resources of Europe's museums,
libraries and archives. As a Museum Curator, your role is to collect
Europeana artifacts (Items) and
create Exhibitions with them.

Some people love working with our cultural heritage. Everyone loves to play.
What if we turn work into play?

Build your own museum

Hunt for treasures

Show others

Keep your exhibitions in order

Definition of Terms

Curator

The role of a Museum player

Exhibit

A Curator has one or more exhibits

Item

The subject artifact of a Europeana record

Visitor

Any visitor to an Exhibit page

Category

A category used to tag Items

Stats

MuseumVille statistics of visitor interactions

Scoring Points

The purpose of playing is to create more and more valuable exhibits.

Popularity

Points are gained on unique visits.

Generated Europeana value:

stats on popular items and viable/interesting groupings of items

Origin Popularity

Points are gained when visitors leave the exhibit by clicking on a link to the
homepage of the item.

Categorizing Records

The free text search can be augmented with and/or complemented by certain
sets of categories. These can be gathered from formal ("top down") thesauri
and taxonomies, such as published SKOS data (e.g. DBPedia concepts).
They can also be created bottom-up with ad-hoc tagging processes
(delicious-style).

[The main usability challenge is to make these fun to add, or effectively
optional. One way is to make them unobtrusive, by integrating them into the
naming, searching and arrangement (or decoration) activities.]

Suggested scoring system (draft):

Points are gained when curators link to these, or improve on
categorizations.

a small but secure flow of points can be gained by creating links to
subjects which other curators also use

a large score can be awarded if the curator do one of the following:

discover an unused category, i.e. hitherto not linked to from any
Europeana Item

create a narrower category which becomes popular by other curators
(either when they find things via the concept, or use it themselves)

object to a certain categorisation and is proven right by something
like popular vote or elected expert judgement